Enhancing the measurement of remote associative ability: A new approach to designing the Chinese Remote Associates Test

The Remote Associates Test (RAT) is an important measurement of creativity and is well known because it is simple to use and the results are objective. To determine how the RAT would work for native Mandarin speakers, RAT was translated into Chinese in 2004 in a version called the CRAT. However, the construct validity of the CRAT was absent, and correlations with other creativity tasks, such as the Divergent Thinking Test and Creative Tendency Inventory, were not significant. Thus, the validity of the CRAT is limited. To enhance the CRAT, based on the remote association of the Association theory, the present study initiates a new approach to redesign the CRAT by developing a set of remote associate items with low frequency vocabularies and a set of close associate items with high frequency vocabularies, according to the associative hierarchies. By investigating the performance of 49 participants on these remote and close associate items, we determine the passing rate, response time, and the correlations with the Divergent Thinking Test and the insight problems task as well as the validity of the CRAT in the measurement of creativity. We find that the passing rate of remote associate items was lower than that of the close associate items as it took more time to solve remote associate items than close ones. The remote associate items were positively correlated to the Divergent Thinking Test and the insight problems task, but the close associate items were not related to these tasks. The passing rates of remote associate items and close associate items were higher in high creativity groups than low creativity groups. The construct of the present CRAT is strongly correlated with creativity and is now effective for measuring the creativity of Mandarin language speakers.